Tuesday, January 12, 2016

Tavis Smiley and Donald Trump got into it over the last few days with each calling the other a racist. Smiley went on CNN last night and made what I thought was a very good point:

“I’m on your program tonight because I made a comment about Donald Trump yesterday on a morning show. And within a matter of hours, Donald Trump had tweeted about me… So if that story broke over the weekend about this white supremacist — again, he can’t be responsible for who is supporting him. But how can he get around to calling me a racist and a hater in less than 24 hours, but since the weekend he hasn’t gotten around to condemning a white supremacist for supporting his campaign.”

If you haven't heard about the white supremacists running robocalls for Trump,I wrote about it earlier but the story has been filled out since then:

William Daniel Johnson has a vision for America. The Los Angeles-based lawyer thinks that the United States will see the creation of a white ethno-state within his lifetime.

“I think Trump’s candidacy is helping move us in that direction,” Johnson said in a Monday phone interview with TPM. “Whether he is elected or not, his candidacy is a big factor in helping destroy this middle-of-the-road Republican mindset.”

Johnson is the chairman of the American Freedom Party, a white nationalist political party, and the founder of a super PAC that plans to blanket early voting states with robocalls encouraging voters to turn out for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. As TPM reported Saturday, voters in Iowa got their first taste of the automated recordings—which heaped praise on Trump’s anti-immigrant views—from the American National Super PAC this weekend. It branded Trump its "Great White Hope" in a press release for the robocall campaign.

The super PAC, founded in November 2015, was known as the American National Trump Super PAC until the Federal Election Commission informed Johnson that a PAC unaffiliated with a particular candidate cannot bear that candidate’s name...

In the first batch of robocalls, Johnson identified himself only as a “farmer and white nationalist.” But that description sells short his work as one of the country’s most active white supremacists.

According to a 2008 article in the Metropolitan News-Enterprise, a Los Angeles daily focused on law and the courts, Johnson made waves as a young attorney after he was revealed to be the author behind a pseuodonymously published book that advocated repealing the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. “Amendment to the Constitution,” published in 1985 under the pen name James O. Pace, laid out Johnson’s proposal that “No person shall be a citizen of the United States unless he is a non-Hispanic white of the European race…Only citizens shall have the right and privilege to reside permanently in the United States.”
[...]
Trump’s platform, which includes forcibly deporting the 11 million undocumented immigrants currently living in the U.S. and temporarily banning all Muslims from entering the country, gave the AFP a mainstream candidate that shared many of its concerns.

“We agree with a lot of the things he says," Johnson said. "Not everything he says, and we’re not Republicans, but we agree with him primarily because of his anti-immigration stances.”

See, he really can appeal across party lines.

You can read more about Johnson here. It is telling that Trump has had nothing to say about this but will take to twitter in a New York minute to condemn those with whom he has a beef, no matter how minor. Apparently, he has no problem with this guy.

It's kind of funny. Just as lefty Democrats are forever deluding themselves that blue collar whites will vote with them because they need health care too, righty Republicans are now convincing themselves that blacks and Hispanics will vote for them because they need jobs too.

Neither side seems to recognize that human beings are motivated in their beliefs and their actions by a lot more than economics. Marx has quite a legacy.